Happy New Year… Urk.

Greetings from early 2025. (That opening line is for the aliens reading this in the distant future, who will definitely find this record and want to place it in their highly fragmented view of humanity’s history. As for why it’s aliens and what happened to humanity, I leave that to your imagination.)

I’ll get this out of the way up front: nothing around the house has changed. Yet. The contractors were supposed to start yesterday, but they have postponed until Monday, which is when I originally thought we’d see them return. And their reasons for the delay are just fine. It’s a small firm, and one is sick but recovering, and another unexpectedly had to say goodbye to his dog on New Year’s Eve. Having dealt with similar things in the relatively recent past, I can easily let him have a couple of days off. The dog — Shadow — was really attached to him, came with him to work everywhere, and was lovely and well behaved. He will be missed.

So we get an extra couple of days without contractors and noise, which is fine. It should all get moving again on Monday.

But the lack of progress on the house doesn’t mean nothing has happened. Oh no.

Note: This next section is going to make one of my Vancouver readers highly uncomfortable. She knows who she is, and I apologize now. You’re welcome to stop reading now if you feel the need. If you carry on, it’s on you.

So… shortly before Christmas we were invited to Boxing Day dinner with the neighbours across the street. And naturally we said yes, given that:

• We like the neighbours.
• We’re living in a tiny space with no real appliances.

We knew there would be some additional family members present, but I didn’t know the details. The appointed hour arrived, and we crossed the street to find that there were 13 people gathered in total for dinner, 10 adults and 3 kids.

Note: This is where the aforementioned Vancouver friend needs to get more serious about her reading habits.

There was no masking. There was no testing. Much like the before times, it was just a bunch of people talking, laughing, eating, and generally having a great time. It was very nice to be included, and we enjoyed ourselves. Then we crossed the street to our mostly demolished home and went to bed. Everything was fine.

And everything was fine the next day as well.

Note for my Vancouver friend: That’s foreshadowing. Seriously.

Boxing Day fell on a Thursday, and Fridays are generally fairly busy here with commitments like writing these posts, so I had previously scheduled an appointment to get vaccinated on Saturday, December 28th. And not just for one vaccine, but two: flu and Covid.

I was chipper at the pharmacy as the pharmacist drove needles into my shoulders (left for flu, right for Covid, and it was a Pfizer booster this time, not a Moderna). I left feeling like I had done all the right things. With luck I would sleep through the worst of my Covid vaccine reaction, and I’d clearly be perfectly fine when the contractors arrived on January 2nd. What could possibly go wrong?

Note: D**** (you know who you are), it’s about to get real.

Now, past experience with flu vaccines tells me that other than a tiny bit of pain at the injection site, I don’t react to them. But regular readers will recall that I definitely react strongly to Covid vaccines. Moderna shots are the worst, but even Pfizer shots make me miserable for 24 hours or more. As I say, I had tried to time things to let me sleep through the worst of it, and I had all of Sunday with nothing in particular to do if the reaction went on longer than usual. If only I’d had a clue.

By Saturday evening, I was slightly weirded out. Yes, both injection sites were sore, but I had no other reactions to speak of, and (for the Covid shot in particular) that was unusual. But I went to bed hoping for the best. Sleep, however, proved impractical. No matter how I attempted to arrange my sorry excuse for a meat sack, one shoulder or both ached. I spent the entire night waking, rolling over, dozing for 15 minutes, and then repeating the cycle. That was fun.

Sunday morning dawned, and I finally started to notice symptoms of the Covid vaccine reaction. All the stuff I usually get: headache, body aches, fever, and so on. It wasn’t fun, and I hadn’t slept through any of it, but oh well. I still had Sunday to get through it.

And around 5 pm on Sunday evening, I felt the fever break. A bit of energy returned, and I thought I could be more human.

Note: Yet more foreshadowing there. You’ve been warned.

But a couple of hours later, I definitely noted I was feeling worse again. And it was a slightly different kind of worse. My throat was starting to get scratchy. Not sore, mind you, just irritated somehow. And the headache returned in a slightly different form, along with what felt like a low fever again.

What was this?!?

My first thought — one I hung onto for a couple of days — was that by getting two vaccines at once, I had changed how my body reacted to the flu shot.

You see, after a day or two, this new round of symptoms settled into a consistent and depressingly persistent rhythm. Get up to an irritated (but not sore) throat and a mild headache. After a couple of hours, those fade but don’t disappear fully. Then, in the mid to late afternoon, the throat gets more irritated again, and there is a cough. There’s a mild respite around dinner, and then things gradually worsen again until bedtime. The cough makes it a bit difficult to get to sleep, but I do, and then the whole thing repeats the next day.

Note: We’re well past foreshadowing now, my friend. Note the use of the present tense. Yes, really.

The next bit of the mystery is only revealed at about 2 am on New Year’s morning. Tinkerbelle — bless her pointed little head — still needs to be taken out in the middle of the night, and I am doing exactly that when I am addressed by the neighbour from across the street, who is wondering if I am either a bear or a thief moving around our side yard at that hour. He’s coming home (alone — hint, hint) from a New Year’s Eve event in which a set of families walk from house to house over the evening, each one serving a new course in the holiday feast.

So I convince him it’s me and that nothing nefarious or ursine is going on, and then ask him why he’s alone.

Turns out, his kid is sick, and he and his wife have been taking turns staying home with her this evening. He was just coming home from the dessert course when he detected my (and Tinkerbelle’s) potentially bearish (or antisocial) noises.

A light bulb clicked on over my head at that point. Well, figuratively.

It was a ridiculous hour, and my memory isn’t great, so please note that all dialogue here is grossly paraphrased and only approximates that actual conversation.

Me: So <child’s name> is sick?

Him: Yeah. We actually took her to the hospital to have her checked out because of <redacted>. They did, and it turns out it’s just a virus or two. Nothing to worry about. Just fluids and sleep.

Me: Oh. When did she get sick?

Him: A couple of days ago.

Me: That actually explains a lot.

So, for those who aren’t catching on, it seems that one of two things happened. Either:

• Someone else at the gathering was ill and shared their bug with <child’s name> and me (at least).
• <Child’s name> was already sick and was shedding virus, and I got it from her.

My whole concern about getting two vaccines at once is now out the window. No, it’s worse. Now I had gotten two vaccines while I was already coming down with some bug. It was probably the case that I didn’t react much to the flu shot like normal, and I definitely reacted to the Covid shot, but in both cases my body was already busy reacting to something else. What is this going to do to my immune system and/or to the immunity I get from the vaccines this time around? I have no clue.

So, here we are a couple of days later, and I can tell you that whatever this bug I was given is:

• It’s tenacious. It has now been with me for four full days without much change in symptoms or severity.
• That might be due to the fact that my body is simultaneously reacting to three different immune assaults.
• But it’s not particularly severe. I am not wiped out or exhausted. It’s just a headache, a throat irritation, a runny nose, and a mild cough.

Note: Yes, dear Vancouver friend, I tested for Covid and came up negative. And while I can already hear you saying the over-the-counter tests aren’t reliable, which is true, I can tell you that having now had eight Covid shots and one actual case of Covid, I know what it feels like, and this is not that disease.

I have no idea what it is, of course. I suppose it could be a cold or a flu. The flu shot obviously didn’t have time to do any good, after all. But everything I read about the flu makes me think this is too mild for that.

No, if I had to guess, this is some weird virus that typically infects children once and never again, but that I missed when I was a kid. And I know of at least one such thing: cytomegalovirus, or CMV. I never got that as a kid, so back when I was allowed to donate blood (thanks, spherocytosis), I was a particularly desirable donor because my blood could be given to premature infants and certain patients with immune compromise issues. My blood doesn’t have the antibodies for CMV, and that was really useful.

However, a quick Google search tells me that I probably don’t have CMV now given the symptoms it usually comes with, but another search says there are hundreds of viruses out there, and that kids can be infected with a dozen a year for the first few years of life. Given I missed getting CMV when I was young, it’s entirely plausible that I have been given the gift of some other virus that I missed when I was a child. Or maybe it’s just a common cold.

Whatever it is, it’s not a ton of fun, but it will end eventually. Hopefully in time for the contractors to arrive on Monday.

Note: Ok D****, that’s done. You can start planning your rant about how I should have masked or skipped the gathering entirely. I look forward to being told everything I did wrong or didn’t do at all. I get it.

A quick update on Tinkerbelle: Yet again we have a Friday afternoon vet appointment, so we don’t have any new information. But we did have an urgent appointment for her two weeks ago given certain… bladder-related incidents. She was put on antibiotics for a UTI, and we decided to risk reducing her prednisone dosage again, so she’s now at one third of her original dose.

If she had a UTI, it seems to have been resolved, but I doubt she had one. I think the issue was caused by the prednisone, which made her much more thirsty than usual. Combine that with general muscle loss due to the same drug, and you have a recipe for incontinence. But we’ve gone some time without an incident now, and I feel like we’re doing OK.

We hope today’s appointment will tell us if her hematocrit has dropped due to the reduced steroid dose, but one thing I have learned about all medicine over the years is that there is no easy answer to anything. So while I hope to know something more next week, experience says that won’t be the case.

Anyway, this has gone on way too long already. Have a happy new year, and may you recover quickly from whatever diseases Mother Nature (or the neighbour’s kid) throws at you.